The Con Man by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online Page A

I am starting a new life here, Daddy, so please don’t be too angry with me. Try to understand. Love and kisses.
    Your loving dghtr,
Mary Louise
    Whoever Detective Phillips of the Missing Persons Bureau was, he had done a good job on the missing Proschek girl. He had put a call through to the Scranton police, who had then checked with the girl’s bank and discovered that $4,375 had been withdrawn from her account on October 31, the day before she’d left. The withdrawal slip had been signed by her and presented by her together with her passbook. Detective Phillips had then put a check on every bank in the city in an attempt to locate a new account started by Mary Louise Proschek. Each bank reported negatively. Phillips had checked on the stationery the girl used and found it to be five-and-dime stuff. The letter had been mailed special delivery and postmarked from a station in the heart of the city. A check had been made of hock shops in the hope the high school graduation ring would turn up. It had not. Phillips had acquired a dental chart from the girl’s parents, and that was in her folder. Kling removed it and gave it a summary glance.
    He remembered that the floater’s lower front teeth had been lost in the water, but he couldn’t remember which of her other teeth had fillings or which had been extracted. He sighed and turned to some of the other information in the folder.
    The preliminary investigatory work had been handled by people other than the Missing Persons Bureau, of course. When Henry Proschek had reported his daughter’s absence to the 14th Precinct, the detective he’d spoken to had immediately checked with the desk officer to ascertain whether or not Mary Louise had been either arrested or hospitalized in his precinct. He then checked with Communications andthe Bureau of Information to find out if anyone answering her description was in a hospital or a morgue at the moment. When his efforts to locate her had proved fruitless, he had then phoned the information in to the MP Bureau, where the routine business of preparing forms in triplicate had then followed. And, to confirm his phone call, he mailed on the next day one of the triplicate copies of his own report to the MP Bureau.

    The MP Bureau had sent out a teletype alarm throughout the city and to nearby police areas. And the name of Mary LouiseProschek had been added to the daily mimeographed list of missing persons that is distributed to transportation terminals, hospitals, and anyplace where a refugee might seek help or shelter.
    The girl was still missing. Perhaps she was the 87th’s floater.
    But if Kling could remember very little about the floater’s teeth, he could remember one important point about her right hand. There had been a tattoo on the flap of skin between the girl’s right thumb and forefinger—the word MAC in a heart.
    On Mary Louise Proschek’s missing person report, under the heading TATTOOS , there was one word—and that word was “None.”

Henry Proschek was a small, thin man with deep-brown eyes and a bald head. He was a coal miner, and the grime of three decades had permanently lodged beneath his fingernails and in the seams of his face. He was dressed in his Sunday best, and he had scrubbed himself vigorously before coming up from Scranton, but he still looked grubby, and if you didn’t know his trade was the honest occupation of extracting coal from the earth, you would have considered him a dirty little man.
    He sat in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct, and Carella watched him. There was indignation in Proschek’s eyes, a flaring indignation that Carella had not thought the miner capable of. Proschek had just listened to Kling’s little speech, and now there was indignation in his eyes, and Carella wondered whether or not Kling had delivered his talk wrong. He decided that Kling had done it in the only way possible. The kid was new, but hewas learning, and there are only so many ways to tell a man his